People: fast forward

CHI at the movies and on tv

Authors:
Aaron Marcus

Can you remember the first science fiction movie you ever saw?
What about the first science fiction program you ever saw on
television? Can you remember what you thought about the
user-interface design or user experience of any computer-based
telecommunication system presented in these shows? And what about
today? Do you cast a critical eye on the technology and its use
whenever you watch the latest movie or video presentation about a
world of the future?

I thought about these questions as I contemplated my own
earliest memories. I am not the most dedicated sci-fi junkie, but
I have been interested in visions of future worlds since I was
small kid growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, more than half a century
ago. Back then, I feasted on Marvel’s Weird Science
Fantasy comic books, If and Galaxy science
fiction pulp magazines, and Ace double-novel science fiction
softcover books (which had a front cover on each end of the book
and half of the book printed upside down). It was also during
this time that I discovered H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds
and 1984. Television was in its first decade and featured
Captain Video and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Even
then Buck Rogers had been featured in movies and appeared on
television. Heroes and villains occasionally spoke to and from
wall-mounted flat-video displays, although most of the
communication took place with desktop microphones and the
occasional loud speaker. Control panels consisted of elaborate
dials and gauges. I remember during the days of live television
when one of Captain Video’s copilots accidentally knocked over
the entire control panel (which probably consisted mostly of
cardboard coated in metallic spray paint) and the entire
desk-size apparatus fell over from the wall of their spaceship.
Captain Video deftly picked it up and commented, "Luckily no
wires were broken, Steve" (or whatever his copilot was
named), then continued on with the show, as if nothing had
happened.

These early experiences with images of future
technology must have influenced my own early interest in
user-interface design because when I was about ten years old, I
built a "rocket-ship control panel" in the basement of
my house, complete with blinking lights, plus dials, gauges, and
clicking knobs salvaged from old radios, my father’s odds and
ends, or local trashcan treasures. I don’t recall thinking about
usability in my design; I focused more on the emotional impact of
blinking lights. With this "sophisticated apparatus,"
my brother and I could make fantasy trips to distant planets and
communicate with extra-terrestrials, at least in our imaginary
use scenarios.

Movies and Television, a 50-Year Run

The earliest science fiction movie was George
Méliès’s 1902 Le Voyage Dans la Lune. This
magician-turned-filmmaker introduced innovative special effects:
disappearances, double exposures, other photographic tricks, and
elaborate sets. However, his user-interface innovation was
modest. Most of us working now probably first encountered the
images of computer-human interaction and communication as it was
imagined in the science fiction movies of the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s,
‘70s, and ‘80s, depending on when we got started, as people and
professionals. The experience growing up with television and
computer games has been quite different for more recent
generations.

For many past decades, Hollywood, which generated a majority
of the science fiction fantasies of CHI, HCI, UI, UX, or whatever
you might call it, often seemed somewhat timid about showing
advances in communication/interaction. I do recall everyone
marveling in 1968 that AT&T Picturephones had become a
reality by 2001 (that was only one of the overly optimistic
estimates of future progress). Later, we would look in awe at
Star Trek’s communicators while marveling at the lapel-pin-based
verbal communication with the main computer systems.

Throughout the decades, the background technology would change
and slowly upgrade. In the 1950s and ‘60s, twirling double
magnetic tape reels and meaningless arrays of blinking lights
were the metaphor for computer power. The lights became more and
more sophisticated over the decades, but the communication media
remained essentially the same. The Star Wars series
beginning in 1976 innovated by making everything gritty and
somewhat broken down, unlike the clean machines of 2001: A
Space Odyssey. The control panels harkened back to earlier
times by making some of the rocket-fighter stations reminiscent
of World War II aircraft cockpits, much as the action itself was
modeled on movie versions of WWII aircraft battles. Likewise for
the Matrix series, which relied upon somewhat clunky old
battle-station controls, the kind that were satirized effectively
in Brazil (one of my favorite romantic but frightening
views of the future). Even Ridley Scott’s eerie view of Los
Angeles in Blade Runner showed essentially the same old
urban displays, albeit larger, crustier, and more depressing than
ever. One of the major visualization innovations was Tron,
which didn’t innovate so much in handheld communication devices
as it did in trying to envision software environments
themselves.

Only in the past decade have some notably different visions
emerged, perhaps because some set designers have hung around
SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI conferences long enough, or because SIGCHI
consultants are actually working with the movie and video
production teams to provide new concepts.

In terms of new approaches, I am reminded of Tom Cruise
dancing with data in Minority Report, of advertisements
following his movements and directing targeted commercial
announcements directly to him as he flees through a future
cityscape. Here represented are interaction and environmental
graphics that seemed thoughtful responses to what technology
could deliver in the 21st century, not the 20th. These seem
related to the transparent user interfaces of the recent
television series Farscape, which also emphasizes more
virtual than concrete physical equipment.

One exotic, memorable innovation in equipment was
eXistenZ, a 1999 sci-fi crime thriller set inside a
virtual-reality game world. Besides the innovative
game-within-a-game-within-a-game premise of the movie, one of the
more striking creations of this film seemed to be the organic
devices that looked like mutant protoplasm combined with some
metallic components. For example, a gun might look partly like a
dead chicken leg, partly like fungus, and maybe a little like a
traditional lethal device.

In the recent AeonFlux, we finally see ubiquitous
computing products appear, like computation and communication
built into clothing. One of the key figures actually talks into
his sleeve, which lights up gently to let us know what is
happening. At least he doesn’t talk into his shoe like Don Adams
as Maxwell Smart in the Get Smart series from 1968-70. In
another AeonFlux scene, characters ingest tiny bits of
chemical or mechanical substances (nano-pills?) that enable them
to communicate with other beings once the substances are
absorbed. In another scene, a character’s ear lights up and we
are thereby informed that the communication devices have been
built into the ear itself. These are considerably more exotic
visions of hardware and software than many contemporary films and
videos.

Today, there are vast resources on the Internet and in print
concerning the history of movies and video, specifically for the
subject of science fiction. Amazon lists 1400 entries for sci-fi
movies and 2200 entries for sci-fi television. However, most of
these deal with the actors and actresses, the story lines, the
directors and producers, even the locations. Almost none of these
resources focuses on the human-computer and the computer-mediated
human-human communication and interaction of these works. Extreme
details abound, like those of the Internet Movie Database and the
data collections of the American Film Institute. However, the
history of user-interface design in movies and television,
specifically in the science fiction genre, remains to be
collected, researched, analyzed, and made available. This subject
will, I hope, be a subject for future books, Internet offerings,
and university course offerings, to say nothing of CHI and sci-fi
conferences.

Conclusion

As some of you may recall, I organized two CHI panels, called
"Sci-Fi at CHI," to which I invited leading science
fiction writers to comment on what the future held in store for
human-computer interaction and communication. I remember Bruce
Sterling’s typically outrageous and funny remarks about the
future, in which he imagined that the ubiquitous computing and
communication device of the future would look like a handkerchief
that could copy anything it was placed over, could present
whatever images or sounds one wished, and could connect to the
Internet to provide all possible communication and computation
support.

Hollywood is typically several generations behind the latest
actual achievements of technology. Movies and television have the
challenge of making hard-to-imagine scenarios make sense to
people who often cannot imagine the full power of user-interface
innovation and creativity harnessed to human-computer and
human-human communication and interaction. Perhaps the CHI
community could help educate the film and television community
more effectively.

One recent collaboration is that of Alexander Singer, a Los
Angeles film director who worked on Star Trek, with scientists
and engineers to produce a short film sponsored by DARPA about
augmented cognition. The film features elaborate scenarios using
special headsets that can scan the user’s brain and detect
overload of certain regions, then shift the information media
mix, say, from verbal to visual or from visual to acoustic, to
enable the human being to think better. This represents a
significant new direction for user-interface flexibility,
somewhat reminiscent of the Japan Friend21 project in the late
‘80s and early `90s, which was reported on at CHI 1994. In that
project, the researchers experimented with metaphor-management
software that would change the entire paradigm of information
display, in that case per user preference, not because some
meta-system had determined that the users were having cognitive
or emotional overload.

By studying the film and video representations of past
decades, we may not only gain a better understanding of past
illusions and delusions, but we might gain a better understanding
of how to present new concepts to the general public and bring
them up to date on the future of human-computer interaction and
communication.

References

URLs

The following is merely a starter kit of Web sites devoted to
the individual offerings or analyses of them:

1. A Bibliography of Science Fiction in
Film and Television
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/2976/SF2-crit.html

3. Timeline of Influential Milestones and
Important Turning Points in Film History, Tim
Dirkswww.filmsite.org/milestones1900s.html

4. Internet Movie
Databasewww.imdb.com

5. Museum of
Televisionwww.museum.tv

6. The Future of Augmented Cognition, an
Alexander Singer Film showcasing techniques soon to be improving
performance on an exponential level
everywherehttp://interactive.usc.edu/members/sfisher/archives/2005/09/im_forum_speake_2.html

Author

Aaron Marcus
aaron.marcus@AMandA.com

About the Author:

Aaron Marcus is the founder and president of Aaron Marcus and
Associates, Inc. (AM+A). He has degrees from both Princeton
University and Yale University, in physics and graphic design,
respectively. Mr. Marcus has published, lectured, tutored, and
consulted internationally for more than 30 years.

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